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Histoires naturelles

Introduction

With Histoires naturelles, on prose poems by Jules Renard, Ravel’s playfulness tipped over into controversy and the premiere in January 1907 was a noisy affair. His chief crime was to eliminate some of the final mute ‘e’s, in the popular style of the café concert. In the opening Le paon, the peacock’s pomposity is undercut by the shortening of ‘la fi-an-cé-e n’ar-ri-ve pas’ to ‘la fian-cé’ n’ar-riv’ pas’. There was even shouting when, in Le grillon, as the cricket took a rest (‘Il se repose’) Ravel’s music came to a sudden halt. Equally disconcerting, after the busy-busy movements of the cricket (which some commentators have likened to Ravel himself), is the magical, visionary epilogue in D flat major, where he later admitted he had deliberately allowed his Romantic inclinations to surface. Debussy, who by 1907 was no longer a friend, complained of the ‘factitious Americanism’ of the more light-hearted passages in the cycle, but even he had to admit Le cygne was beautiful music. The piano part is marked ‘very gentle and enveloped in pedal’ and the setting of seven semiquavers in the right hand against two in the left makes for effortless progress, quite different from the cricket’s precise gestures. Ravel dedicated the song to Misia Godebska, a mover and shaker in Parisian musical circles who was soon to become Diaghilev’s right-hand woman, and it could be that Ravel saw her as the swan, gliding smoothly through society with her eye fixed on the main chance.

‘Not a bite, this evening’, complains the fisherman at the start of Le martin-pêcheur. The cool, diamond-like, almost Messiaenic chords do not react (unlike the 1907 audience which here rose to an apogee of outrage) but go their way ‘as slowly as possible’. Here is a music of silence, the singer somehow conveying breathlessness while breathing deeply. Pierre Bernac called it ‘the most difficult mélodie of the set’. But for the pianist the worst moments come in La pintade. With its gruppetti and shrill, explosive acciaccaturas, it looks back not just to Alborada del gracioso but to another fowl-piece, ‘Baba-Yaga’ from Musorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition. It makes an entertaining and aesthetically uncomplicated finale to the set, but also displays Ravel’s aggressive side.

He will surely get married today. It was to have been yesterday. In full regalia he was ready. It was only his bride he was waiting for. She has not come. She cannot be long. Proudly he processes the with air of an Indian prince, bearing about his person the customary lavish gifts. Love burnishes the brilliance of his colours, and his crest quivers like a lyre. His bride does not appear. He ascends to the top of the roof and looks towards the sun. He utters his devilish cry: Léon! Léon! It is thus that he summons his bride. He can see nothing drawing near, and no one replies. The fowls are used to all this and do not even raise their heads. They are tired of admiring him. He descends once more to the yard, so sure of his beauty that he is incapable of resentment. His marriage will take place tomorrow. And, not knowing what to do for the rest of the day, he heads for the flight of steps. He ascends them, as though they were the steps of a temple, with a formal tread. He lifts his train, heavy with eyes that have been unable to detach themselves. Once more he repeats the ceremony.

It is the hour when, weary of wandering, the black insect returns from his outing and carefully restores order to his estate. First he rakes his narrow sandy paths. He makes sawdust which he scatters on the threshold of his retreat. He files the root of this tall grass likely to annoy him. He rests. Then he winds up his tiny watch. Has he finished? Is it broken? He rests again for a while. He goes inside and shuts the door. For an age he turns his key in the delicate lock. And he listens: Nothing untoward outside. But he does not feel safe. And as if by a tiny chain on a creaking pulley, he lowers himself into the bowels of the earth. Nothing more is heard. In the silent countryside the poplars rise like fingers in the air, pointing to the moon.

He glides on the pond like a white sledge, from cloud to cloud. For he is hungry only for the fleecy clouds that he sees forming, moving, dissolving in the water. It is one of these that he wants. He takes aim with his beak and suddenly immerses his snow-clad neck. Then, like a woman’s arm emerging from a sleeve, he draws it back up. He has caught nothing. He looks about: the startled clouds have vanished. Only for a second is he disappointed, for the clouds are not slow to return, and, over there, where the ripples fade, there is one reappearing. Gently, on his soft cushion of down, the swan paddles and approaches … He exhausts himself fishing for empty reflections and perhaps he will die, a victim of that illusion, before catching a single shred of cloud. But what am I saying? Each time he dives, he burrows with his beak in the nourishing mud and brings up a worm. He’s getting as fat as a goose.

Not a bite, this evening, but I had a rare experience. As I was holding out my fishing rod, a kingfisher came and perched on it. We have no bird more brilliant. He was like a great blue flower at the tip of a long stem. The rod bent beneath the weight. I held my breath, so proud to be taken for a tree by a kingfisher. And I’m sure he did not fly off from fear, but thought he was simply flitting from one branch to another.

She is the hunchback of my barnyard. She dreams only of wounding, because of her hump. The hens say nothing to her: suddenly, she swoops and harries them. Then she lowers her head, leans forward, and, with all the speed of her skinny legs, runs and strikes with her hard beak at the very centre of a turkey’s tail. This poseuse was provoking her. Thus, with her bluish head and raw wattles, pugnaciously she rages from morn to might. She fights for no reason, perhaps because she always thinks they are making fun of her figure, of her bald head and drooping tail. And she never stops screaming her discordant cry, which pierces the air like a needle. Sometimes she leaves the yard and vanishes. She gives the peace-loving poultry a moment’s respite. But she returns more rowdy and shrill. And in a frenzy she wallows in the earth. Whatever’s wrong with her? The cunning creature is playing a trick. She went to lay her egg in the open country. I can look for it if I like. And she rolls in the dust, like a hunchback.